For this purpose, it coined the name Four-Mations, a pun indicating its interest in new talents. The idea was to create a sort of everlasting animation festival on TV, introducing dozens of different cultures and styles in a few hours.Īnother mission for the channel was to find and promote new talents, both British and foreign. Channel 4’s choices were good: the works it made were never commonplace or uninteresting. It promoted and celebrated women animators, devoting strands of programming to them and to their works it also presented animation productions from such Slavic countries as Czechoslovakia, virtually unknown in the rest of the world. This schedule capitalized on the coattails of established programs to show productions that otherwise would be seen by very few people.Īt this time, Channel 4 Animation made particular choices. To achieve this, animation shorts were broadcast in two different slots: a five-minute one at 7:55 p.m., after Channel 4 News, and another fifteen-minute slot at 9:45 p.m., after the popular series Dispatches. The channel’s animation had to gain high audience shares. Animation was costly to make, which led to the creation of shorts (in addition, animation is best suited to short productions). From the outset, the animation product had to be submitted in a different way to the ‘classic’ half-hour TV program. Privatization would have risked reducing the channel’s artistic freedom.Ĭhannel 4 faced, and solved, many different problems. After some months, he changed his mind and decided to maintain Channel 4 as a public service. Animation for adults was scarcely seen on British television.’ 5 Channel 4 was instrumental in the production of some remarkable films of the 1980s, from the works of David Sproxton and Peter Lord (the founders of Aardman Animations) to those of the Quay brothers, to Murakami’s When the Wind Blows, to Alison De Vere’s The Black Dog.Īt the beginning of the 1990s, Michael Grade, Channel 4’s chief executive, forwarded a proposal for a possible privatization of the channel. That policy was formulated on the basis of trying to be different from other television channels. ‘The bulk of Channel 4’s commissioned animation was intended for adult audiences, and quite deliberately so. The result was a patronage system of coproductions (only rarely were works completely financed by Channel 4). It was extraordinary that a television channel – an entity usually devoted to all that is commercial and profit-making – produced and financed experimental animation that was often hermetic and difficult and certainly not readily appealing to a wide range of viewers. From 1989 to 1996 it was dominated by short films that vied for the Oscar category, 4 mostly commissioned by Channel 4. 3īritish animation peaked at the end of the 1980s. All of its programs were financed by its commercial activities, including advertising. Unlike the public utility that was the BBC, Channel 4 – though public – didn’t receive any public funding. Its purpose was to be an alternative to BBC and ITV, and it started broadcasting on 2 November 1982. It is not possible to discuss British animation 2 from the 1990s onwards without talking about Channel 4.Ĭhannel 4 was created in 1981 as a public utility by an Act of Parliament.
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